I got a virus tonight and decided to recover my system with my external drive. The external drive contains a bootable clone of my C: drive that I made with Norton Ghost. I tried booting from the external drive but I got a blue screen. If it would have worked I would have made another clone back to C: and boot from that.

The only copying software I have that runs outside of Windows is a CD-ROM that I got with a Hitachi drive 4-5 years ago. It was able to start the copying process, but it always fails at around 8%. I am almost positive that both of these drives are in good working order, I just need a better copying/cloning software to use outside of Windows.One person I asked said that the clone I made is probably bad, but I am pretty confident that what is on the cloned USB drive is good.

Any suggestions?

Btw the OS is XP Pro.

srhoades

10-05-2008, 22:32

Boot with a linux live cd. You should be able to read the drive and at least burns cd's of your data. Then you can format and reinstall.

Some BIOS's won't boot from an external drive. If it is just a cheapie enclosure remove the hard drive from the enclosure and install it like a regular drive.

Rekced

10-05-2008, 22:45

All I want to do is make a copy of my C drive from the external to the the internal. Norton does have a boot up utility and it does see the contents of the external drive, but it does not have an option to do a direct copy in the menu outside of Windows. There's gotta be something that will allow me to copy from the external to the internal.

I would have already swapped the drive but this thing is a Lenovo notebook and it is not easy to get the hard drive out.

silentpoet

10-05-2008, 22:58

Check out the ultimate boot cd. It has some utilities that might help. I know one will let me browse my laptop hard drive that I can't get mounted with linux.

Patrick Graham

10-05-2008, 23:18

Norton Ghost has a recovery CD that you need to boot to, then fire up ghost from the recovery CD and re-image your system drive from the cloned drive.

If you created an "image" of your system drive with Ghost corporate (ghost32.exe) you can use UBCD4Win to boot but you'll need a copy of ghost32 somewhere that will be accessible when you boot to CD.

Rekced

10-05-2008, 23:56

Norton Ghost has a recovery CD that you need to boot to, then fire up ghost from the recovery CD and re-image your system drive from the cloned drive.

If you created an "image" of your system drive with Ghost corporate (ghost32.exe) you can use UBCD4Win to boot but you'll need a copy of ghost32 somewhere that will be accessible when you boot to CD.

Are you talking about the Norton Ghost 12.0 CD-rom I bought? I tried booting from that, but I can't find a utility in there that allows me to re-image my hard drive. All it seems to want to do is take me back to an earlier point.

Patrick Graham

10-06-2008, 00:24

Are you talking about the Norton Ghost 12.0 CD-rom I bought? I tried booting from that, but I can't find a utility in there that allows me to re-image my hard drive. All it seems to want to do is take me back to an earlier point.

Have you swapped the drive in your system with the drive you cloned to?

Make sure it's master, no slave.

Rekced

10-06-2008, 00:25

Have you swapped the drive in your system with the drive you cloned to?

Make sure it's master, no slave.

I can't do that because it is a Lenovo notebook and there is no easy way to get in.

The cloned drive is a primary/master.

Rekced

10-06-2008, 01:41

Ok, I tried booting using a copy of Linux Live (Slax). It's an OS that runs off the CD-ROM.. So I tried it and the OS worked but it did not see my C drive at all, only my external. Norton Ghost is able to see my C drive, the factory recovery partition AND the external drive. All I need is a program that will allow me to transfer it all back over. I spent FOREVER configuring my computer the way it is so I must get it working this way.